Annual Review 2020

I've been doing these annual reviews since 2011. They're mainly an exercise for me to see what I accomplished and what I didn't in the previous year. In the first half of the year we had the bushfires, the hailstorm, and then the pandemic and the "shutdown".

On 5 January we woke up to orange light and visibility of only a couple of hundred metres at best where I live. It felt like being on the surface of Titan (but much warmer :)).

My brother visited from Israel later in the month when conditions were a little better. The day he arrived was the hailstorm. Shortly after that the Orroral Valley Fire got going. At one point we had ash falling in Canberra like snowflakes. In early February I went on my only trip outside Canberra this year to Auckland, New Zealand for the IAEE Asia-Pacific Conference. 

 

 

ANU switched from in person teaching to online teaching in late March. An extra week was added to the semester to give us time to adapt. It wasn't too hard as we already have lot of material online, including lectures recorded in the previous two years. My masters research essay course was very easy to shift online. My environmental economics course was harder. I took the whiteboard in my office home to do tutorials: 

 

 

The big challenge was that the schools closed down for around 8 weeks, I think (my son Noah is 4 years old and in preschool for most of the week usually), at exactly the same time and we also have a baby who was 9 months old then. So, I didn't have much work time that wasn't occupied with teaching. In total, there have been 117 cases of COVID-19 in Canberra (population: 426k) and 3 people have died.

In the second half of the year, school and daycare came back and gradually things got more under control. I was actually quite productive research-wise and finished all the papers that were waiting to be revised and resubmitted when the shutdown struck. Well, after doing a lot of work on a revise and resubmit for Climatic Change, I gave up, resulting in this blogpost instead.

I even started four new projects towards the end of the year. One is about ranking public policy schools in the Asia-Pacific, which we have already submitted.  This is a paper that my colleague, Björn Dressel, long wanted to write. My first paper coauthored with a political scientist. Another is a citation analysis, following up on my 2013 paper in the Journal of Economic Literature. The third is about animal power and energy quality... The fourth is a follow on to our paper in the Journal of Econometrics this year on time series modeling of global climate change. Actually, we might give up on this one too. I was supposed to give a presentation on it at the AGU meeting in December, but we withdrew the paper as our early results were hard to understand.

We also wrote a policy brief for the Energy and Economic Growth Programme on prepaid metering in developing countries.

We published five papers with a 2020 date:

Leslie G. W., D. I. Stern, A. Shanker, and M. T. Hogan (2020) Designing electricity markets for high penetrations of zero or low marginal cost intermittent energy sources, Electricity Journal 33, 106847. Working Paper Version | Blogpost

Stern D. I. (2020) How large is the economy-wide rebound effect? Energy Policy 147, 111870. Working Paper Version | Blogpost

Nobel A., S. Lizin, R. Brouwer, S. B. Bruns, D. I. Stern, and R. Malina (2020) Are biodiversity losses valued differently when they are caused by human activities? A meta-analysis of the non-use valuation literature, Environmental Research Letters 15, 070030.

Csereklyei Z. and D. I. Stern (2020) Flying more efficiently: Joint impacts of fuel prices, capital costs and fleet size on airline fleet fuel economy, Ecological Economics 175, 106714. Working Paper Version | Blogpost | Data and Code

Bruns S. B., Z. Csereklyei, and D. I. Stern (2020) A multicointegration model of global climate change, Journal of Econometrics 214(1), 175-197. Working Paper Version | Blogpost | Data

We posted four working papers. Two of those were already published this year and the links are above. The third is a revised version of our paper on the industrial revolution:

Directed technical change and the British Industrial Revolution. December 2020. With Jack Pezzey and Yingying Lu. Blogpost 1, Blogpost 2

The fourth is a nineteen author review for Annual Review of Environment and Resources:

Energy efficiency: What has it delivered in the last 40 years? December 2020. With Harry Saunders et al. Blogpost

We have five papers under review at the moment (three are resubmissions), one revise and resubmit we are working on, and eight more that we are actively working on or trying to finish.

Google Scholar citations exceeded 19,000 with an h-index of 53. I wrote a few more blogposts this year. This is the 10th this year compared to only three last year. Twitter followers rose from 1250 to 1500 over the year. At one point, I actually unfollowed everyone and then added back people I wanted to follow. This made my Twitter feed more manageable and I lost very few followers in the process. 

 

In July, I moved all my email (more than 160k messages) from Outlook on local hard drives to GMail. I use Thunderbird as the front end. Now all my data is in the cloud (everything else is on Dropbox) and can be accessed from anywhere. I still use locally stored applications, so if I want to use specialized software – for example, my econometrics package RATS – I still need to use my own computer.

 

I did 7 external assessments of people for promotion, tenure, or fellowships for universities in Pakistan, Australia, South Africa, USA, Sudan, and Singapore. I'd only done 9 of these previously in my career according to my records. Hard to explain this sudden rush! As a result, I only did 12 reviews for journals, which was lower than typical in the past. And a bunch of papers for EAERE, a proposal for the ARC...

I taught environmental economics and the masters research essay course again. This was the third time I taught the environmental economics course. After a few weeks we had to shift both courses online as I mentioned above. One of the challenges was carrying out a final exam remotely, which I discussed in a workshop ANU ran in the following semester. 

 

Xueting Zhang started as my PhD student.  In the first year, she has been focused on coursework, we are now transitioning to research. I have one other student for whom I am the primary supervisor, Debasish Das. He's working on prepaid metering in Bangladesh and other energy related topics. This involves struggling with a big data set. We only used a small sample in the Energy Insight linked above.

Looking forward to 2021, a couple of things can be predicted:

• I was awarded a Francqui Chair at the University of Hasselt in Belgium for the 2020-21 academic year. So, now I have to come up with ten hours of lectures. What can't be predicted is if I will actually travel to Belgium.
• I'll be teaching environmental economics and the master's research essay course again in the first semester. This year, we are also introducing a year long "Master's Research Project" in parallel with the one semester "essay".
• I'm hoping we get the resubmitted papers and the revise and resubmit published, but that is in the hands of the editors, referees, and journal publishers...
  

Energy Efficiency: What Has It Delivered in the Last 40 Years?

I'm one of nineteen authors of a new review of energy efficiency economics. It was commissioned for the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, where it is still in (second-round) review. The team was put together and led by Harry Saunders and Joyashree Roy.

Over the past four decades different disciplinary approaches independently adopted different definitions of energy efficiency to answer specific problems. Even within economics there are at least three different ideas of energy efficiency. Technical efficiency in economics compares the quantity of inputs used to produce given outputs (or vice versa) to the best practice or frontier level. This is a relative measure of energy efficiency. But economists often talk about energy efficiency in absolute terms too,  measured as either simply an increase in energy services per unit input or using the concept of energy augmenting technological change where the amounts of other inputs and the technology associated with them are held constant. Energy augmenting technological change is usually used when modeling economy-wide rebound, whereas the energy services per unit input might be used when investigating the energy efficiency gap.

The energy intensity of economies (a metric measuring energy consumption per unit of GDP), which is often interpreted as a proxy for energy efficiency, has trended downwards (increasing efficiency) globally and in many major economies over the last century. But as panel (a) below shows, in many regions of the world, especially poorer or hotter regions, energy intensity instead increased. Today, energy intensity is more similar around the world than in the past.

Innovation in energy-saving technologies is an important driver in improving aggregate energy efficiency deployment by lowering costs and inducing adoption. The productivity of numerous energy-using products has improved dramatically. (e.g., lighting had a 10,000-fold improvement in lumens/Watt since the start of the industrial revolution). 

Energy efficiency improvements, in themselves, generally increase economic welfare. But when we consider negative externalities, such as pollution emissions, welfare effects are more ambiguous. Interventions such as improperly calibrated subsidies to improve energy efficiency or mandates to use costly technologies can lead to a reduction in household welfare.

There is still uncertainty and difficulty in measuring economy-wide rebound effects. Rebound may limit the ability to reduce or constrain overall energy use. In general, it makes more sense to address the environmental impacts of energy use with specific environmental policies rather than trying to reduce energy use with energy efficiency policies.

The contribution of different factors to the persistent “energy efficiency gap”, i.e., the difference between the energy consumption observed and the potential energy consumption levels that would result from the adoption of cost-efficient energy efficient technologies and strategies, is still not well understood. Market and regulatory failures, departure of consumer behavior from rational choice theory, lack of information, the principal-agent problem, among other issues may all contribute to the energy efficiency gap.

Policy interventions aimed at overcoming or reducing barriers to energy efficiency deployment target behavioral anomalies and perceived market failures. They include provision of feedback to energy users, the use of social norms, commitment devices, rewards and regulatory mechanisms such as taxes, subsidies, building codes, etc. The literature and evidence are mixed on the effectiveness of each of these, but all seem to show promise to some degree. 

Methodological advances for examining energy efficiency effects on energy use have been substantial. Primary advances include randomized control trials coupled with appropriate econometric methods, developments in econometric methods and lab/field experiments, agent-based modeling formulations, general equilibrium methods, and behavioral science. 

The following diagram summarizes the state of knowledge across different scales and the needed scope of future research:

Future research should bring together researchers from different fields to shed new light onto energy efficiency questions. Examples of such endeavors include: (i) at the micro-level, a better understanding of consumer choice and behavior by combining insights from engineering and the advanced metering and sensing infrastructure, with those from micro-economic theory as well as the theory of choice and with behavioral economists’ models; (ii) at the program evaluation level, there is a need to continue to develop methods to understand causal inferences using econometrics as well as machine learning to better understand program outcomes; (iii) at the macro-level, developing flexible and credible general equilibrium models that also capture environmental and climate externalities outcomes, and that have good input data to enable us to understand the dynamics of energy efficiency improvements across the economy, the environment, and society, are needed.